Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Myth Creation in Romantic Ideology
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GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI: MYTH CREATION IN ROMANTIC IDEOLOGY Marco Accattatis Rutgers University December 14, 2010 1 Le premier verset du Stabat de Pergolèse, Duo la plus parfait & le plus touchant qui soit sorti de la plume d’aucun Musicient. –Jean-Jacques Rousseau1 Me l’hanno pagato dieci ducati, mentre non vale dieci bajocchi. –Giovanni Battista Pergolesi2 The figure of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi is one of the most elusive and controversial in the history of Western music. To this day, three hundred years after his birth, many historians and musicologists are scrambling to define the profile of a figure who Dario Della Porta defines as a ‘ghost’ (1986, 47). The two quotations above neatly encapsulate the chasm that exists between the bleak perception that the composer had of his own work, and the posthumous fame which, from Rousseau onward, propelled Pergolesi into the Olympus of musical genius. For this reason, the main challenge facing modern musicology has been to reconstruct a realistic portrait of Pergolesi in order to position him somewhere in between such apparent extremes. In Pergolesi tra mito e storia (Pergolesi Between Myth and History) Francesco Degrada, one of the most eminent researchers of Pergolesi, asked the following questions: Why has this musician in particular been elevated as a symbol not only of a period of Italian music, but as a symbol of music itself, of its capacity to express the history and destiny of man? Why a myth of Pergolesi? We must not forget that the myth of Pergolesi is also a historic reality. (1986a, 16) 1 “The first duet of the Stabat [mater] by Pergolesi is the most perfect and touching to come from the pen of any composer.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, Genève (1781), 252. 2 “They paid me ten ducati [$200] for [the Stabat mater] even though it’s not worth ten bajocchi [$2].” Quoted in Dario Della Porta, “G.B. Pergolesi: breve storia di una biografia,” 49. 2 Hence, this short study on the figure of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi is, in part, a study of the manner in which historiography in general and musicology in particular arrives at constructing a narrative that, aside from elucidating the particulars of a given historical figure or event, is ultimately meant to serve the ideology of the individual historian or musicologist. The controversial nature of Pergolesi is exemplified by the divergent biographical accounts of the composer. On the one hand, Hucke and Monson, while acknowledging how the “highly romanticized accounts of Pergolesi’s life written in the late 18th and the 19th centuries distorted his career and influence,” maintain that “he was clearly among the most successful and respected composers of his generation.”3 On the other hand, Walker, recounting the disastrous failure of Pergolesi’s L’Olimpiade in Rome in 1735, where the composer was supposedly struck by an orange thrown from the audience, writes how Pergolesi, at the time of the performance, supposedly confessed to fellow composer Egidio Duni that except for his comic intermezzi, all his operas had been received with indifference (1949, 297). By the same token, Della Porta seems to corroborate Pergolesi’s self assessment when he writes that the construction of Pergolesi’s biography has been directly proportional to his overwhelming fame. The sentimental late eighteenth century and the romantic nineteenth century seemed to consider as almost unacceptable this ineffable, opaque figure, this gray life divided between chapel master for a couple of Neapolitan aristocratic families and an operatic activity which had a few mediocre successes and some major failures. (1986, 47) 3 Helmut Hucke and Dale E. Monson. “Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista.” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 3 Another element that may lend credence to this latter thesis is the fact that by the time he died of tuberculosis at the young age of 26, Pergolesi’s career had spanned slightly over six years. During this time, according to the tabulations of the most recent critical edition directed by Barry S. Brook, director of The Pergolesi Research Center at the City University of New York, he composed approximately 36 works. In addition, had Pergolesi been as successful during his lifetime as Hucke and Monson would like their readers to believe, it would be hard to explain why, upon his death in 1736 in a Capuchin Monastery in Pozzuoli, near Naples, his body was buried in the common pit next to the cathedral. While this type of burial was the norm for a commoner at this time, it goes to show that that the composer died without honors. Finally, as if to confirm this, no biographer had shown any interest in Pergolesi until July 1772, when Boyer published his “Notices sur la vie et les ouvrages de Pergolèse” in the Mercure de France, thirty-six years after the composer’s death (Della Porta 1986, 48). While Pergolesi’s biography and lifetime success is obviously still a matter of contention, there is unanimous agreement among musicologists on the unprecedented posthumous fame he enjoyed. According to Degrada, “Pergolesi was the first composer that fostered an interest in his biography aside from his music” (1986a, 10). This sentiment is shared by Hucke and Monson when they write that “the almost universal fame he attained posthumously represented a new phenomenon in music history.”4 But if it wasn’t because of the fame and success Pergolesi enjoyed during his lifetime, as Della Porta and Walker strongly suggest, what exactly could have been the cause that prompted 4 Helmut Hucke and Dale E. Monson. “Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista.” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 4 such an unprecedented reversal of fortune for a composer apparently “not quite important enough (in the world’s eyes) to warrant a yearbook”?5 Most modern musicologists would agree on 1752 as the year that marked the resurgence of Pergolesi as a composer. In that year, a dispute erupted in Paris, which lasted for the subsequent two years, over the respective merits of French tragédie lyrique and Italian comic opera (opera buffa) commonly known as the Querelle (or Guerre) des Bouffons. The two major antagonists in this querelle were French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The catalyst for this musical and political controversy, which had been brewing in France since the early years of the eighteenth century, was the performance of an Italian operatic company led by director Eustachio Bambini and known as the ‘Bouffons’. Among the works performed by the company was Pergolesi’s comic intermezzo La serva padrona. The peculiar aspect of the Querelle is that all the leading anti-Establishment intellectuals – also known as the philosophes – sided with Rousseau, while all the pro-Establishment intellectuals sided with Rameau. At the time the Querelle erupted, Jean-Philippe Rameau was considered the most prominent exponent of French music. For this reason, when Rousseau and the philosophes attacked Rameau’s music, the pro-Establishment intellectuals perceived it as an attack on France itself. 5 Michael Talbot, Music & Letters, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 391, http://www.jstor.org/stable/736769 (December 14, 2010). 5 The performances of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, while not the opening salvo in the Querelle, prompted Rousseau to write a Lettre sur la musique française (Letter on French Music) on November 1753 in which he reasoned that French music was not only inferior to Italian music, but that as music and as drama it was totally worthless. French music, he argued, did not match the sentiments it attempted to express – the sentiments were not genuine anyway – the melody was concealed under a mass of complicated harmony and counterpoint, and, he peremptorily concluded, “the French nation has no music and can never have any.” (Paul, 1971, 397) By the end of 1754, more that sixty letters and pamphlets had been written in which numerous ad hominem attacks were exchanged. Rousseau was labeled as a “frantic madman about to burn the temple of art” (398) afflicted with a “sick brain, an equivocal heart, and a dangerous and false mind.”6 The vehemence of the argument between the two factions, and its political and ideological underpinnings, has led many historians to treat the Querelle as a prelude to the French Revolution of 1789 (399). Neapolitan historian Gianni Race, among others, has suggested that the enthusiasm of Rousseau and of the other philosophes toward the music of Pergolesi cannot simply be ascribed to musical aesthetics alone but, in addition, by the presence in his music of sentiments which could be seen as anticipatory of the ideas of the Enlightenment (1986, 122). It was such sentiments, perhaps, that Rousseau was alluding to in his Lettre when he criticized French music for lacking genuine sentiments. For this reason, we must spend a few words on the historical context within 6 “Mais d’un cerveau malade, d’un cœur équivoque, & d’un intelligence? dangereux & faux.” Jacques Cazotte, Observations sur la lettre de J.J. Rousseau au sujet de la musique francaise (1753), 6. http://ia700105.us.archive.org/15/items/observationssurl00cazo/observationssurl00cazo.pdf (accessed on December 10, 2010) 6 which the music of Pergolesi emerged, particularly in relation to Neapolitan opera buffa, since it was this type of music, as exemplified in La serva padrona, that prompted the Querelle des Bouffons. From a historical perspective, Pergolesi’s music falls in a transitional period for Italy in general, and the city of Naples in particular. Francesco Degrada writes that the music of Pergolesi and of his generation must be situated within the tensions which Italian and southern Italian society lived during the turbulent transition from the Austrian rule to that of the House of Bourbon: from a social order based on the brutal preservation of privilege by purely parasitic classes to a modern conception of the state endorsed and supported by intellectuals, the most enlightened sector of the aristocracy and the productive classes.